Hammy has asked for the
wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello again,
I have an XML stream that I am trying to process and I can not figure out how. The problem I am running into is sometimes one of the nodes is coming back with multiple nodes in an array and sometimes it is not. How do I check what the format is before continuing.
It is either going to be:

Yes you can, but in this case it would be better to use XML::Simple's ForceArray option to ensure that the 'Table' elements are always represented as an array. That way you use the same code to process them regardless of whether there's one or many.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other